Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/267

238 ch for the first and l for the other. But Grotefend was now disposed to drop the s from the last letter and to read r, or some slight modification of that sound, corresponding to the pronunciation adopted on the other side of the Tigris for the letter which is rendered anl on this side. Accordingly in his translation of the Murgab inscription he writes simply Kurusch and elsewhere Kurhush. In his revised alphabet it appears as rh. (rrotefend has also the merit in this tract of being the first to indicate that, the t of Lassen, might sometimes have the sound of thr as in 'puthra.' and possibly in 'Artakhshathra.' In his alphabet, however, he drops the sound of r and makes the value th.

In the following year a more important contribution was made by the appearance of two essays, one by E. F. F. Beer in Germany, the other by Eugène Jacquet in France. The former was published in the 'Hallische Allgeineine Zeitung,' The other in four papers inserted in the 'Journal Asiatique' (1838). Beer was a native of Bötzen. where he was born in 1805 and received his early education. He went to Leipzig in 1824 and thenceforth he chiefly devoted himself to the study of Semitic Palaeography. He died in 1841, at the age of thirty-six. Both he and Jacquet showed that Lassen was entirely mistaken in supposing that there were different cuneiform signs to indicate the long and short signs of the vowels a, i, u. They simultaneously discovered the correct values of the two letters 27 and 41. The first, the h of Grotefend and Lassen, is ascertained to be y; the other, the 'α of Grotefend and the 'α long' and ng of Lassen.